22,000 Were Arrested for It, And It Was Perfectly Legal
Last edited Wed May 2, 2012, 03:44 PM - Edit history (1)
Why did it take almost 30 years to stop the NYPD from arresting thousands of poor people under three void laws?
In January 2004, Eddie Wise was sitting in the holding pen of Bronx Civil Court, waiting to be arraigned after an arrest, when he spotted Lisa C. Cartier Giroux, a lawyer he knew from Bronx Defenders, a non-profit organization that represents the indigent. Wise got Giroux’s attention and, from his holding pen, began proclaiming his innocence. His arrest report accused him of “engaging numerous pedestrians in conversation with his hand out requesting money.” The exact charge facing Wise was a violation of New York’s law against loitering.
Giroux listened to Wise and agreed to look into it. When she went back to Bronx Defenders, she ran a quick computer search and learned something surprising. Wise’s hunch that he had been illegally arrested was right, albeit for a different reason than he suspected. The loitering law Wise had been arrested under some twenty times in two years had been ruled unconstitutional nearly 15 years earlier. Back in 1990, a group of fed-up panhandlers from Tompkins Square Park in Manhattan’s East Village had convinced a court that if the Salvation Army could loiter while soliciting funds, on the street or door-to-door, so could they. The court struck the law down.
Attorneys at Bronx Defenders had heard of arrests like Wise’s and seen a few other clients complaining about them. The attorneys didn’t know how many had been wrongly arrested under the void loitering law or whether race had anything to do with it. But the lawyers suspected that the problem was far bigger than Wise and the handful of other people they had met. Together, they started working on a scheme to stop the city from enforcing the void law.
http://www.dominionofnewyork.com/2012/04/30/22000-were-arrested-for-it-and-it-was-perfectly-legal-2/#.T6F-Qug7Xko
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